Re:Nudity harms children
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Societal laws may be completely arbitrary and self-perpetuating, but the consequences of working against them are as real as ignoring natural laws. Not because it's "wrong" in any objective sense, but because you are fighting the current.
That is the most insightful thing I've read on Slashdot in a long time. It may be the most insightful thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
The adapter came out right around when the system was dying and was only sold directly at Sega's site I believe
Nope.
When the Dreamcast died, I bought one for USD$69 (or USD$49, whatever it was right at the end) along with a bunch of games. I didn't know enough about consoles to understand the need to snap up cheap accessories at the time. However, I looked 'em over. At the local Fry's (Houston, Texas), there were a couple of cases of those broadband adapters going for, iirc, USD$29.95. I thought to myself "Why would I want one of these things?" Two weeks later, when I'd googled and studied and figured out that accessories like alternate input devices, VMUs, and broadband adaptors might be good things to have, *everything* was gone from the store shelves.
I don't really use the thing anymore, but it's still a fine, cheap Tetris machine that houseguests can pick up and play.
Hmm . . . it's also unlawful to use government property to surf porn sites at work, you know . . .:p
No, it's not.
I work for a U.S. govt agency, the most-hated big one, if you must know. I have substantial experience with setting up and operating "investigative workstations." There are rules. Copious logs are kept in both electronic and paper formats. You get audited with some frequency. But, if it's required for the job, even a low-level federal toady like me can surf porn at work. And hate sites, and all sorts of weird little backwater nooks and crannies on the ol' info hiway, every one of them populated by an astounding assortment of misfits.
Maybe not as bad as Slashdot, though, now that I think about it...
Arg. In the example you cite, your usage is just as ambiguous as mine. When I hear "two hundred and six," I think "two hundred and six what? Tenths? Hundredths? Thousandths?" Common usage is not a justification and no convention of usage is universally applicable without a chance of misunderstanding.
Fact is, we could go round and round on this forever. Yes, the superfluous and incorrect sprinkling of the word "and" in spoken numbers is common usage in both my location and, apparently, yours. As long as people understand what you're saying, does it really matter?
As for the technical rightness of the thing in the contexts of "American English," "Commonwealth English," "spoken English," "proper English," "colloquial English," etc., I'll leave that to the English profs to debate. I think I know whose side they'd take, but I sincerely doubt either of us has the qualifications to offer ourselves as an authority on the subject.
Maybe you can explain why Americans customarily write dates MDY? Seems perverse to me
No can do. MDY seems just as perverse to me. It's totally illogical. Still, it's a rule that, by consensus, helps folks communicate. I imagine that as the world gets smaller, the rule will change and we'll adopt the more logical DMY order for writing dates.
None of the above, however, changes the fact that using "and" in spoken numbers for any purpose other than marking the decimal is highly illogical, too. I can only hope that about the time we give up our stupid MDY date-ordering that makes us sound illogical, other English-speaking countries (and Americans who would like to stop sounding like they failed fifth-grade grammar) will give up throwing random "ands" into their spoken numbers.
Now, so that I may be educated properly about other cultures, please provide me with the Australian-version-of-the-English-language grammatical rules for inserting the word "and" into spoken numbers.
when speaking we say "one thousand five hundred and twenty one"...
No, we don't.
We say "one thousand five hundred twenty one." Or we say "one thousand five hundred and twenty one hundredths." The word "and" in a spoken number is used to mark the decimal. Doing otherwise is classically incorrect, confusing to even casual listeners because there's no set of rules for sticking the word into long numbers (Would we say "One million and one hundred thousand and fifty?" Didn't think so.) and makes the speaker sound, at best, like he's rambling on, on the verge of incoherency.
Personal pet peeve, as if you couldn't tell.
Re:There's still something that separates us
on
We Are All Nerds Now
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· Score: 1
I'm old enough to have figured all that stuff out for myself, already, but it sure is nice to see it in one place, all that wisdom nicely collected and organized.
Somebody's going to have to find the reference. I've looked but I don't see it.
A while back, Leo LaPorte was interviewing some photographer on the TechTV program The Screensavers. The subject of the interview was the transition from film to digital and the photographer even brought along his Nikon D100 to illustrate the level of equipment capability/cost that had to be reached before serious photographers no longer had an excuse to eschew digital. The photographer mentioned that he had, long ago when he was basically a kid just starting out, spoken to Ansel Adams. This was around the time some of the first digital images were sent back from one of the early Mars probes. The guy in the interview said Adams was fascinated by those particular images and the whole concept of digitizing data and controlling every little bit of it. The photographer being interviewed said that Adams had even said something to the effect that this sort of technology was what kids should be getting into because it was the future.
I know I saw this on The Screensavers. Dadgum that I can't find anything about it on their site.
Re:There's still something that separates us
on
We Are All Nerds Now
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· Score: 1
It's a shame that you never spoke again, but I've got to wonder -- what did you do after that incident? Wait for her to sober up, and try to talk to her? Send her some flowers and a note apologizing for the bad timing, but saying that you were serious and hoped she'd think about it? Or did you just go away and stew over the whole thing?
We worked at the same large employer on different floors in different departments. She let a mutual friend know that I'd better not ever speak to her again, period. The word got to me.
I actually tried to talk to her a few times. If I greeted her in the hallway, she'd simply look away and keep walking. If I walked up to her in the cafeteria, she'd get up and walk away. Do stuff like that a couple of times in front of people you know and even casual acquaintances will tell you, as they told me, "Give it up, man; it ain't happenin'."
Kinda painful, but a real learning experience. I never spoke up again. My next platonic friend, I think, saved my life by moving away. If she hadn't, I don't think I would have gotten laid for the entirety of my 30s. But that's another story.
Re:There's still something that separates us
on
We Are All Nerds Now
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It tears you up inside but you can rest assured that you will never, ever work up the balls to say anything.
Nope. It's not that we lack the gumption to speak up. It's that we understand, deep down, that doing so would be a disaster.
I spoke up. I'll save you the liquor-soaked, mall-parking-lot-at-3am speech she gave me about all men being untrustworthy with her feelings and how she couldn't just talk to any of them. I'll spare you the running commentary in my mind comparing my self-worth and the current cost of chopped liver. I'll just say this: I spoke up. I let her know that what she was looking for was sitting right next to her. And how did the hottest babe you've ever seen up close react?
Blank stare.
More blank stare. Jaw drops open. Some part of her emerges from the fog of intoxication just long enough to remember that this guy is a nerd, for God's sake! How dare he even entertain a fantasy of being anything other than the muscle who hauls boxes when I move out of my apartment! And then, she speaks:
"Get out! Get the fsck out! How dare you hit on me when I'm in pain!"
We never spoke again.
So guys, you think all you need is courage? Forget it. The fact that you think only your reticence is standing in the way of hooking up with that special platonic friend is the ultimate proof that your relationship insights are nonexistent.
but _all_ Government divisions and agencies have to accept cash, the paper kind. The idiot who tried to pay the IRS with a truckload of pennies deserved the bi!@#slapping he got.
Details of the incident, please. I'd love to hear about it.
The last time I witnessed something like this was over 20 years ago at the IRS office in Houston. Back then, local offices had a teller function. One day a guy comes in and to pay off a liability and he's obviously peeved about the whole thing. I don't remember the amount, exactly, but seem to recollect that is was in the low thousands, maybe between 1 and 2 thou. He produced thousands of rolls of pennies to pay the liability.
The manager of the teller unit stuck strictly to established procedure. He put one teller on an open window to serve everyone else and immediately got another teller to volunteer for overtime. The two of them then proceeded to accept the payment according to procedure, which required every payment to be counted three times prior to acceptance and issuing a receipt. They then broke up the rolls and, by hand, counted all those pennies three times. It started in the morning and went on till late that night because this little teller cage, a fine place to drop off a check, didn't come equipped with a machine to count coins. It all had to be done by hand.
The guy who was paying thought it was funny, at first. Then he tried to leave. But he couldn't have a receipt until it was all counted. And he had to be present for the counting. Every time he had to go to the bathroom, the conference room was emptied and locked. If he wanted to leave, he'd either have to wait for the count to be finished or take his money with him.
So he sits. And waits. And watches. And glares, while the manager and teller count and count and count. After a couple of hours, his wife was literally screaming at him about what a jerk he was and how they couldn't take all those pennies back to the bank because the rolls had been broken and she damn sure wasn't going to re-roll them. Eventually, she told him he started this crap and he was going to have to finish it. Then she stormed out and left him there.
In the wee hours, the teller unit manager was nice enough to let this guy use a phone to call a cab. For some reason, he didn't want to call his wife to come pick him up.
The moral of all this? Government entities take cash. In this age of staff-slashing, they don't like to because they've often shut down their teller functions. But if you show up at an IRS office to make a payment and you insist on doing so in cash, it'll be accepted. You may have to talk to the manager, but if you insist on a Form 809 receipt (the only form from the IRS that's truly a receipt), you'll eventually get them to take the money.
Based on the way you've phrased your question, I'm assuming you really want to learn *photography* as opposed to learning how to work gadgets. If you want to learn perspective, exposure, composition - if you want to learn to *see* pictures and you succeed in that quest, any cameras you use in the future will be essentially interchangeable. They all do the same thing, if you've learned the fundamentals.
If those assumptions are wrong, stop reading. If they're correct, here are my thoughts.
Yes, you want an all-manual camera. It should have a single-focal length lens of good quality. The more limited the equipment, the more you'll have to learn the basics. As for 35mm SLRs, I see a few choices.
1. Pentax K1000 - I've got one and think it's the bee's knees. But the upgrade path for lenses is, from a pro perspective, limited. They're also *the* classic teaching camera, so on the used market (they aren't made any more) they're overpriced. Take a pass. 2. Nikon, something old, used, and manual - You could get an old F, F2, FM, or something similar. Most of those would blow your budget, but if you can get a good deal, go for it. 3. Nikon, something newer - The FM-10 (which, to a lot of folks, isn't really a Nikon) has that wonderful, takes-all-the-old-lenses mount and is a decent camera. The lens and system upgrade path is wonderful, assuming you don't envision yourself, someday, consumed by a long-lens lust that only Canon can truly satisfy. New, the FM-10 is in the low $300 range with a slow zoom lens that would need to be replaced. Perhaps you could find something used. 4. Canon, something old - Not recommeded. The Tlb and Ftb were classics. I loved them. But Canon abandoned that lens mount and their newer EOS cameras are all automated up the wazoo, not a good situation for someone who wants to learn, old school. Of course, if the Canon system and those gorgeous long lenses it contains are irresistible, you can get a Rebel cheap and just accept that you'll need to pay attention to making decisions for yourself instead of letting the camera do it for you. 5. Odds 'n ends - There are a bazillion cameras on the used racks for cheap that can reasonably be considered disposable. A fair quality, unpopular discontinued manual SLR with an F2 or faster 50mm lens can be had for under $100 if you do a little digging. Checking bhphotovideo.com for used, manual focus, off-brand SLRs, I see a Ricoh for $139 and a Vivitar for $89. Throw on a decent $50, 50mm lens and you've met budget. Just resign yourself to the fact that you'll sell it back to a local dealer for $35 at some point in the next couple of years when you outgrow it. At that point, you may have decided you truly love photography and you'll move on to a current Nikon or Canon. Or you may have decided that you've learned enough and aren't really serious about photography, anyway, so you'll move on to a digital point and shoot. Either way, for the rest of your life you'll take better pictures than most anybody else in the room just because you took a little time to learn the basics.
Contrast that to what happened at my employer, a large federal agency.
1. Management decides that call centers aren't "inherently governmental" and, in acquiesence to the current political climate, decides to outsource the functions. 2. Management outsources the call center by hiring contractors to fill the seats of the assistors who've been doing the job for years. 3. Old assistors scramble for other jobs at the agency. Some retire but most fill in positions elsewhere. 4. New assistors find out that they don't have the foggiest notion how to help with all the weird proprietary apps we use. 5. Contractor complains that their bad performance metrics are due to our weird software and unique problems but that they can do better if they just hire MCSE certs as assistors. Contractor says this requirement means a change to the contract that is the fault of the agency and, therefore, they have the right to double their fee. 6. Agency, in a rare display of testicular fortitude, says "Screw you" and non-renews the call-center contract. 7. Agency, in an all-too-common display of head-up-their-collective-ass-ness, decides to take the positions back in-house but decides that the contractor experience has shown that only MCSE certs can do the work so they upgrade the positions two full grades and announce the jobs. 8. All the old assistors apply for their old jobs. 9. Agency tells the old assistors that the qualification requirements are now higher and that none of the old assistors are qualified for their old jobs. 10. Agency hires MCSEs from outside the agency who have no understanding of the software they're to support, are getting paid much bigger money, and *still* have to be trained to do the work, usually by the old assistors who could do the jobs in their sleep.
Way too much of the time, outsourcing is just plain evil. It screws things up that no one anticipates.
I'm not all that dedicated. I just get up at 4 because I need an hour to exercise and get something to eat, a half hour to get a shower and get on the road, and an hour drive time to the job. That gives me just a little cush since my start time is 7AM.
Did I mention that I routinely get to bed at nite at 7PM or so?
So I keep what to most people would appear to be sorta strange hours. But evidence of dedication? Hmmm. I wonder how I could sell that to my boss...?
I love the 24-hour Walmarts because I do my weekly marketing at about 4AM every Saturday. (That's the time I get up during the week, so I see no need to change my hours on the weekend.) The great thing about shopping at that time is the fact that all the strippers just got off work. I've seen women in there that would have given ole Sam a heart attack.
Excellent point. The original poster said "quarterly tax payments." I was thinking "quarterly tax returns," (which most likely would have been 941s, aka employment taxes) but it could have been some other liability.
Thanks for keeping me straight. My points 2 and 3 still apply, though, no matter what type of return was involved.
First, the most important thing to remember is that the person who decides not to pay employment taxes is a thief. Period. In order to kep their company going, they stole money from their own employees. Say that you owe me USD$100 and I ask you "Hey, look, I owe my neighbor $10. Can you just give me $90 right now and then let him have the $10 when he drops by this afternoon?" You agree to do so, but when the neighbor shows up you refuse to give him the $10. What have you just done? You've stolen $10 from me, that's what. Employment taxes are the same thing. When your employees earn $1000 and you withhold $100 of that to pay employment taxes, that's no longer your money. (It's called the "trust fund" portion of the taxes.) You are obligated to pay that money over to the government on behalf of your employees. If you don't you're stealing from them. Period. Even if you can't make up your matching portion, failure to pay over the trust fund portion is theft, pure and simple.
If you ever hear that your employer is in trouble for nonpayment of employment taxes, find another employer and do it quickly. You work for an untrustworthy thief and cheat.
Second, it's not an agent but an Officer who collects money for the IRS. Agents, the people who conduct audits, will ask for and accept payment at the end of an examination but they don't go to such lengths as you describe to collect that money. In fact, they don't have the legal authority to do as you describe. So insert a few months into your story and turn the case over to a Revenue Officer before you start talking about the collection of taxes.
Third, Officers don't get receivables assigned to the government except in the (incredibly rare) case of a collateralized installment payment agreement and no delinquent A/Rs would be considered as acceptable collateral by any Officer I've ever known. What probably happened was that the Officer offered to collect the delinquent A/Rs. That happens all the time via the service of a Notice of Levy. That part of the job is actually pretty fun; it helps resolve the delinquency and teaches a lesson to another deadbeat at the same time. It's a win-win all around.
Good story, btw, but you should be a tad more careful with your facts.
Just out of curiosity - what would happen if you told your employer that you weren't going to leave your phone in your car? If you're doing your job, and you've passed any security screening, either they trust you or they don't. If they do, then the camera-phone shouldn't be an issue. Besides, there are a lot better ways to steal information.
Nothing would happen to me if I wanted to bring in a camera. I've done it often to document the state of a wiring closet, for example. If I have a business reason, that's fine. The more-commonly-encountered prohibitions are for members of the public who can't have a valid reason to use a camera on the premises - BUT - even that prohibition isn't absolute. If you want to meet with an employee and you advise that employee ahead of time that you wish to record and photograph the meeting (there's an established procedure), then you'll be allowed to bring in your camera and recorder for that purpose. We'll also have our tapes running at the same time and in the same place, though, so you don't have the option of refusing to allow us to record the same meeting.
In general, I don't like the idea that I'm trustworthy enough to be allowed in our server room (where my cube is, btw) but I have to go through the metal detectors to get into the building. That's pretty silly. Give me five years, when I'll be retired, and I'll be living so far out in the boonies that I'll never have to deal with this crap again. The boonies or Paraguay, them's the two options I'm considering at the moment.
They could confiscate things that are illegal to posess, like drugs explosives or concealed firearms.
Yep, as long as those things are illegal. Back in the day, the legal right for a civilian to carry a concealed weapon in Texas was limited to "travelers." There wasn't a good, legal definition of traveler but there were a few court cases on point. In general, it was considered foolhardy to rely on your travel status to justify carrying. But there are the exceptions. For years, whenever anyone was caught with a concealed weapon at Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the person would be denied access to the gate area but the local prosecutor would decline to prosecute. Obviously, if you were about to get on a plane you were a traveler and, thus, your concealed carry was legal under state law. And since the screeners caught you before you got into the secured area of the airport, you hadn't run afoul of any federal law. The only real consequence was that getting all this sorted out was guaranteed to make you miss your flight.
Come on, the camera as security issue is bogus. What are you gonna do, stop everyone with a cell phone because you can now snap 1.2 megapixel pictures with some models and send them in real time?
Yes. Absolutely. Try going into a few federal buildings these days with one of the latest and greatest phone/camera combos. Where I work, you'll be politely (and then, if necessary, firmly) told to return to your car and leave it there.
Yes, I think this is silly. But I also know that this is the type of crap we're going to have to deal with for a long while.
There's a lot of money to be made by scaring the shit out of you.
Truer words were never spoken. I remember when I first woke up to this fact. I was just a kid, watching Donohue's talk show. He was interviewing people who were imploring the public to be more cognizant of the possibility that their kids could go missing. Without specifics, they were giving the impression that there were pervy kidnappers around every corner, just waiting to snatch your kids, abuse them in unspeakable ways, and then sell them into sexual slavery.
Then one of the guests said that 50,000 kids go missing every year and something clicked in my brain. It may have been the fact that this guy dropped such a horrible statistic and the program then cut to a PSA for the organization he represented, a PSA begging for donations. But, more likely, I think it was that the Vietnam war had not been long over and we'd had 50,000 casualties in that war. Everyone knew someone with a family member hurt or killed in Vietnam. But I didn't know anyone whose kid had been snatched off a playground by some old man in a dirty raincoat.
I did some research. The horrifically inflated figures the guy was spouting included runaways, throwaways, kids living with non-custodial spouses, and a huge measure of just plain old exaggeration. The best data that I could find, from the Illinois State Police (the first law enforcement agency to really study the problem) was that true, non-family, non-ransom, oh-my-God-some-perv-just-grabbed-my-little-boy-off -the-playground abductions happened somewhere between 50 and 150 times a year in the U.S.
That's really bad. I'd be willing to give money to any organization that could help put a dent in that problem. But any organization that feels the need to pander for donations by scaring the crap out of everyone gets nada from me.
Of course, those of you old enough to remember will recall that in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, the fear-mongerers won. We went through a long period where the media would have had us believe that Satanic child molestors were everywhere. Thank goodness everyone eventually realized that was all a bunch of bunk. Now, we've settled down to just a simple, constant state of excess paranoia.
I watched the first "Survivor" with great interest. Thought it was fascinating. Great concept. Lots of fun. Waited with great anticipation for the finale.
And then that psycho Machievellian POS won.
I haven't watched any of the cut-throat reality shows since. I think they're downright evil.
I send my kid to school for academic advancement, not to be spoonfed some lobbiest's political agenda.
That sounds good, but it's never been the case. Athletics, shop classes, etc., have been a part of the education scene for as long as anyone alive can remember. They serve purposes other than pure academic advancement but someone, somewhere a long time ago decided that those purposes were sufficiently valid that time should be taken off of pure academics to engage in those activities.
The question is: What non-academic stuff is so important that we can all (pretty much) agree on the positive utility of taking time out of the school day to focus on it? Where I came from, football is so important that it ran roughshod over everything else. I didn't agree, but I was definitely in the minority with that opinion.
For many people today, discussion of HIV/AIDS is so important that it should happen in school. It's not purely academic and it certainly is also about socialization and life skills, but most people are willing to accept that some HIV/AIDS education during the school day isn't a bad thing. So now we come to political agendas and my real point. Once you get beyond math, everything is tainted by a political agenda. You can't avoid it. Do you object, on the grounds that it is spoonfeeding some lobbiest's political agenda, to the teaching of HIV/AIDS-related information? Even if it's by a "gay activist?" What about gun safety? Is that important enough to spend some time on? Even if the only really effective and accurate program on the subject is the "Eddie Eagle" program from the National Rifle Association? Have you fully reviewed the genesis of the history books used in your local school? The amount of political jockeying that ultimately decides what does and doesn't go into school books is flat out insane.
My point is that everything is political. Condemning the RIAA from wanting to get into the schools on the grounds that they are political is pointless. The schools are already shot through with political agendas.
Far better, I think, to simply object on the grounds that this thing isn't important enough to waste your kid's limited time on.
I used to work maintenance for an apartment complex. The law in the State of Texas was, in brief, that if you hadn't paid your rent, you didn't have any rights. And, realistically, when you're three days delinquent in your rent the management simply must stick their head in your door to find out, at minimum, if you've skipped on your lease.
So I go out with the manager while she's looking for skips. Everyone got a note on their door two days previously and they're now three days late on the rent. She always knocks loudly and waits a reasonable period before opening any doors.
So she cracks open one door and a knife comes flying out the crack. It was a pretty good throw, hard and accurate to hit that little slit when the door opened, but it was just a bit high. She closed the door and called the police. They refused to do anything since she hadn't seen the thrower. But you better believe that she enforced the lease and we moved those idiots out 7 days later.
My point? When you live in an apartment, at least in Texas, there are a bunch of folks who have a legal right to enter your apartment at any time, often with no notice. Know your rights and know the law when you rent.
PS - Mercy, do I have some stories about the stuff I saw in apartments. Mind you, outside of an emergency, I only entered apartments in response to a call for service. I was invited in, in writing, usually to perform work while people were gone to work during the day.
So why on earth did they leave their pot stash right out on the coffee table? (I swear, it was half a kilo - the pile was 6 inches high and two feet across.) So why do people call for service when they know that as soon as I enter their apartment I'm going to figure out that they are the folks who stole all the furniture from around the pool last month? It's just amazing the way some people don't think before they act. And yes, I moved all the furniture out of their apartment and put it back by the pool and they never said a word.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That is the most insightful thing I've read on Slashdot in a long time. It may be the most insightful thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
Nope.
When the Dreamcast died, I bought one for USD$69 (or USD$49, whatever it was right at the end) along with a bunch of games. I didn't know enough about consoles to understand the need to snap up cheap accessories at the time. However, I looked 'em over. At the local Fry's (Houston, Texas), there were a couple of cases of those broadband adapters going for, iirc, USD$29.95. I thought to myself "Why would I want one of these things?" Two weeks later, when I'd googled and studied and figured out that accessories like alternate input devices, VMUs, and broadband adaptors might be good things to have, *everything* was gone from the store shelves.
I don't really use the thing anymore, but it's still a fine, cheap Tetris machine that houseguests can pick up and play.
No, it's not.
I work for a U.S. govt agency, the most-hated big one, if you must know. I have substantial experience with setting up and operating "investigative workstations." There are rules. Copious logs are kept in both electronic and paper formats. You get audited with some frequency. But, if it's required for the job, even a low-level federal toady like me can surf porn at work. And hate sites, and all sorts of weird little backwater nooks and crannies on the ol' info hiway, every one of them populated by an astounding assortment of misfits.
Maybe not as bad as Slashdot, though, now that I think about it...
:-)
Arg. In the example you cite, your usage is just as ambiguous as mine. When I hear "two hundred and six," I think "two hundred and six what? Tenths? Hundredths? Thousandths?" Common usage is not a justification and no convention of usage is universally applicable without a chance of misunderstanding.
Fact is, we could go round and round on this forever. Yes, the superfluous and incorrect sprinkling of the word "and" in spoken numbers is common usage in both my location and, apparently, yours. As long as people understand what you're saying, does it really matter?
As for the technical rightness of the thing in the contexts of "American English," "Commonwealth English," "spoken English," "proper English," "colloquial English," etc., I'll leave that to the English profs to debate. I think I know whose side they'd take, but I sincerely doubt either of us has the qualifications to offer ourselves as an authority on the subject.
No can do. MDY seems just as perverse to me. It's totally illogical. Still, it's a rule that, by consensus, helps folks communicate. I imagine that as the world gets smaller, the rule will change and we'll adopt the more logical DMY order for writing dates.
None of the above, however, changes the fact that using "and" in spoken numbers for any purpose other than marking the decimal is highly illogical, too. I can only hope that about the time we give up our stupid MDY date-ordering that makes us sound illogical, other English-speaking countries (and Americans who would like to stop sounding like they failed fifth-grade grammar) will give up throwing random "ands" into their spoken numbers.
Fine. Cool. Wonderful.
Now, so that I may be educated properly about other cultures, please provide me with the Australian-version-of-the-English-language grammatical rules for inserting the word "and" into spoken numbers.
I'm waiting.
No, we don't.
We say "one thousand five hundred twenty one." Or we say "one thousand five hundred and twenty one hundredths." The word "and" in a spoken number is used to mark the decimal. Doing otherwise is classically incorrect, confusing to even casual listeners because there's no set of rules for sticking the word into long numbers (Would we say "One million and one hundred thousand and fifty?" Didn't think so.) and makes the speaker sound, at best, like he's rambling on, on the verge of incoherency.
Personal pet peeve, as if you couldn't tell.
I'm old enough to have figured all that stuff out for myself, already, but it sure is nice to see it in one place, all that wisdom nicely collected and organized.
I owe you. Big time.
Somebody's going to have to find the reference. I've looked but I don't see it.
A while back, Leo LaPorte was interviewing some photographer on the TechTV program The Screensavers. The subject of the interview was the transition from film to digital and the photographer even brought along his Nikon D100 to illustrate the level of equipment capability/cost that had to be reached before serious photographers no longer had an excuse to eschew digital. The photographer mentioned that he had, long ago when he was basically a kid just starting out, spoken to Ansel Adams. This was around the time some of the first digital images were sent back from one of the early Mars probes. The guy in the interview said Adams was fascinated by those particular images and the whole concept of digitizing data and controlling every little bit of it. The photographer being interviewed said that Adams had even said something to the effect that this sort of technology was what kids should be getting into because it was the future.
I know I saw this on The Screensavers. Dadgum that I can't find anything about it on their site.
We worked at the same large employer on different floors in different departments. She let a mutual friend know that I'd better not ever speak to her again, period. The word got to me.
I actually tried to talk to her a few times. If I greeted her in the hallway, she'd simply look away and keep walking. If I walked up to her in the cafeteria, she'd get up and walk away. Do stuff like that a couple of times in front of people you know and even casual acquaintances will tell you, as they told me, "Give it up, man; it ain't happenin'."
Kinda painful, but a real learning experience. I never spoke up again. My next platonic friend, I think, saved my life by moving away. If she hadn't, I don't think I would have gotten laid for the entirety of my 30s. But that's another story.
Nope. It's not that we lack the gumption to speak up. It's that we understand, deep down, that doing so would be a disaster.
I spoke up. I'll save you the liquor-soaked, mall-parking-lot-at-3am speech she gave me about all men being untrustworthy with her feelings and how she couldn't just talk to any of them. I'll spare you the running commentary in my mind comparing my self-worth and the current cost of chopped liver. I'll just say this: I spoke up. I let her know that what she was looking for was sitting right next to her. And how did the hottest babe you've ever seen up close react?
Blank stare.
More blank stare. Jaw drops open. Some part of her emerges from the fog of intoxication just long enough to remember that this guy is a nerd, for God's sake! How dare he even entertain a fantasy of being anything other than the muscle who hauls boxes when I move out of my apartment! And then, she speaks:
"Get out! Get the fsck out! How dare you hit on me when I'm in pain!"
We never spoke again.
So guys, you think all you need is courage? Forget it. The fact that you think only your reticence is standing in the way of hooking up with that special platonic friend is the ultimate proof that your relationship insights are nonexistent.
Details of the incident, please. I'd love to hear about it.
The last time I witnessed something like this was over 20 years ago at the IRS office in Houston. Back then, local offices had a teller function. One day a guy comes in and to pay off a liability and he's obviously peeved about the whole thing. I don't remember the amount, exactly, but seem to recollect that is was in the low thousands, maybe between 1 and 2 thou. He produced thousands of rolls of pennies to pay the liability.
The manager of the teller unit stuck strictly to established procedure. He put one teller on an open window to serve everyone else and immediately got another teller to volunteer for overtime. The two of them then proceeded to accept the payment according to procedure, which required every payment to be counted three times prior to acceptance and issuing a receipt. They then broke up the rolls and, by hand, counted all those pennies three times. It started in the morning and went on till late that night because this little teller cage, a fine place to drop off a check, didn't come equipped with a machine to count coins. It all had to be done by hand.
The guy who was paying thought it was funny, at first. Then he tried to leave. But he couldn't have a receipt until it was all counted. And he had to be present for the counting. Every time he had to go to the bathroom, the conference room was emptied and locked. If he wanted to leave, he'd either have to wait for the count to be finished or take his money with him.
So he sits. And waits. And watches. And glares, while the manager and teller count and count and count. After a couple of hours, his wife was literally screaming at him about what a jerk he was and how they couldn't take all those pennies back to the bank because the rolls had been broken and she damn sure wasn't going to re-roll them. Eventually, she told him he started this crap and he was going to have to finish it. Then she stormed out and left him there.
In the wee hours, the teller unit manager was nice enough to let this guy use a phone to call a cab. For some reason, he didn't want to call his wife to come pick him up.
The moral of all this? Government entities take cash. In this age of staff-slashing, they don't like to because they've often shut down their teller functions. But if you show up at an IRS office to make a payment and you insist on doing so in cash, it'll be accepted. You may have to talk to the manager, but if you insist on a Form 809 receipt (the only form from the IRS that's truly a receipt), you'll eventually get them to take the money.
Based on the way you've phrased your question, I'm assuming you really want to learn *photography* as opposed to learning how to work gadgets. If you want to learn perspective, exposure, composition - if you want to learn to *see* pictures and you succeed in that quest, any cameras you use in the future will be essentially interchangeable. They all do the same thing, if you've learned the fundamentals.
If those assumptions are wrong, stop reading. If they're correct, here are my thoughts.
Yes, you want an all-manual camera. It should have a single-focal length lens of good quality. The more limited the equipment, the more you'll have to learn the basics. As for 35mm SLRs, I see a few choices.
1. Pentax K1000 - I've got one and think it's the bee's knees. But the upgrade path for lenses is, from a pro perspective, limited. They're also *the* classic teaching camera, so on the used market (they aren't made any more) they're overpriced. Take a pass.
2. Nikon, something old, used, and manual - You could get an old F, F2, FM, or something similar. Most of those would blow your budget, but if you can get a good deal, go for it.
3. Nikon, something newer - The FM-10 (which, to a lot of folks, isn't really a Nikon) has that wonderful, takes-all-the-old-lenses mount and is a decent camera. The lens and system upgrade path is wonderful, assuming you don't envision yourself, someday, consumed by a long-lens lust that only Canon can truly satisfy. New, the FM-10 is in the low $300 range with a slow zoom lens that would need to be replaced. Perhaps you could find something used.
4. Canon, something old - Not recommeded. The Tlb and Ftb were classics. I loved them. But Canon abandoned that lens mount and their newer EOS cameras are all automated up the wazoo, not a good situation for someone who wants to learn, old school. Of course, if the Canon system and those gorgeous long lenses it contains are irresistible, you can get a Rebel cheap and just accept that you'll need to pay attention to making decisions for yourself instead of letting the camera do it for you.
5. Odds 'n ends - There are a bazillion cameras on the used racks for cheap that can reasonably be considered disposable. A fair quality, unpopular discontinued manual SLR with an F2 or faster 50mm lens can be had for under $100 if you do a little digging. Checking bhphotovideo.com for used, manual focus, off-brand SLRs, I see a Ricoh for $139 and a Vivitar for $89. Throw on a decent $50, 50mm lens and you've met budget. Just resign yourself to the fact that you'll sell it back to a local dealer for $35 at some point in the next couple of years when you outgrow it. At that point, you may have decided you truly love photography and you'll move on to a current Nikon or Canon. Or you may have decided that you've learned enough and aren't really serious about photography, anyway, so you'll move on to a digital point and shoot. Either way, for the rest of your life you'll take better pictures than most anybody else in the room just because you took a little time to learn the basics.
I vote for option 5.
Contrast that to what happened at my employer, a large federal agency.
1. Management decides that call centers aren't "inherently governmental" and, in acquiesence to the current political climate, decides to outsource the functions.
2. Management outsources the call center by hiring contractors to fill the seats of the assistors who've been doing the job for years.
3. Old assistors scramble for other jobs at the agency. Some retire but most fill in positions elsewhere.
4. New assistors find out that they don't have the foggiest notion how to help with all the weird proprietary apps we use.
5. Contractor complains that their bad performance metrics are due to our weird software and unique problems but that they can do better if they just hire MCSE certs as assistors. Contractor says this requirement means a change to the contract that is the fault of the agency and, therefore, they have the right to double their fee.
6. Agency, in a rare display of testicular fortitude, says "Screw you" and non-renews the call-center contract.
7. Agency, in an all-too-common display of head-up-their-collective-ass-ness, decides to take the positions back in-house but decides that the contractor experience has shown that only MCSE certs can do the work so they upgrade the positions two full grades and announce the jobs.
8. All the old assistors apply for their old jobs.
9. Agency tells the old assistors that the qualification requirements are now higher and that none of the old assistors are qualified for their old jobs.
10. Agency hires MCSEs from outside the agency who have no understanding of the software they're to support, are getting paid much bigger money, and *still* have to be trained to do the work, usually by the old assistors who could do the jobs in their sleep.
Way too much of the time, outsourcing is just plain evil. It screws things up that no one anticipates.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, says I!!!
I'm not all that dedicated. I just get up at 4 because I need an hour to exercise and get something to eat, a half hour to get a shower and get on the road, and an hour drive time to the job. That gives me just a little cush since my start time is 7AM.
Did I mention that I routinely get to bed at nite at 7PM or so?
So I keep what to most people would appear to be sorta strange hours. But evidence of dedication? Hmmm. I wonder how I could sell that to my boss...?
I love the 24-hour Walmarts because I do my weekly marketing at about 4AM every Saturday. (That's the time I get up during the week, so I see no need to change my hours on the weekend.) The great thing about shopping at that time is the fact that all the strippers just got off work. I've seen women in there that would have given ole Sam a heart attack.
:-)
Excellent point. The original poster said "quarterly tax payments." I was thinking "quarterly tax returns," (which most likely would have been 941s, aka employment taxes) but it could have been some other liability.
Thanks for keeping me straight. My points 2 and 3 still apply, though, no matter what type of return was involved.
Close, but that's not the way it works.
First, the most important thing to remember is that the person who decides not to pay employment taxes is a thief. Period. In order to kep their company going, they stole money from their own employees. Say that you owe me USD$100 and I ask you "Hey, look, I owe my neighbor $10. Can you just give me $90 right now and then let him have the $10 when he drops by this afternoon?" You agree to do so, but when the neighbor shows up you refuse to give him the $10. What have you just done? You've stolen $10 from me, that's what. Employment taxes are the same thing. When your employees earn $1000 and you withhold $100 of that to pay employment taxes, that's no longer your money. (It's called the "trust fund" portion of the taxes.) You are obligated to pay that money over to the government on behalf of your employees. If you don't you're stealing from them. Period. Even if you can't make up your matching portion, failure to pay over the trust fund portion is theft, pure and simple.
If you ever hear that your employer is in trouble for nonpayment of employment taxes, find another employer and do it quickly. You work for an untrustworthy thief and cheat.
Second, it's not an agent but an Officer who collects money for the IRS. Agents, the people who conduct audits, will ask for and accept payment at the end of an examination but they don't go to such lengths as you describe to collect that money. In fact, they don't have the legal authority to do as you describe. So insert a few months into your story and turn the case over to a Revenue Officer before you start talking about the collection of taxes.
Third, Officers don't get receivables assigned to the government except in the (incredibly rare) case of a collateralized installment payment agreement and no delinquent A/Rs would be considered as acceptable collateral by any Officer I've ever known. What probably happened was that the Officer offered to collect the delinquent A/Rs. That happens all the time via the service of a Notice of Levy. That part of the job is actually pretty fun; it helps resolve the delinquency and teaches a lesson to another deadbeat at the same time. It's a win-win all around.
Good story, btw, but you should be a tad more careful with your facts.
Nothing would happen to me if I wanted to bring in a camera. I've done it often to document the state of a wiring closet, for example. If I have a business reason, that's fine. The more-commonly-encountered prohibitions are for members of the public who can't have a valid reason to use a camera on the premises - BUT - even that prohibition isn't absolute. If you want to meet with an employee and you advise that employee ahead of time that you wish to record and photograph the meeting (there's an established procedure), then you'll be allowed to bring in your camera and recorder for that purpose. We'll also have our tapes running at the same time and in the same place, though, so you don't have the option of refusing to allow us to record the same meeting.
In general, I don't like the idea that I'm trustworthy enough to be allowed in our server room (where my cube is, btw) but I have to go through the metal detectors to get into the building. That's pretty silly. Give me five years, when I'll be retired, and I'll be living so far out in the boonies that I'll never have to deal with this crap again. The boonies or Paraguay, them's the two options I'm considering at the moment.
Yep, as long as those things are illegal. Back in the day, the legal right for a civilian to carry a concealed weapon in Texas was limited to "travelers." There wasn't a good, legal definition of traveler but there were a few court cases on point. In general, it was considered foolhardy to rely on your travel status to justify carrying. But there are the exceptions. For years, whenever anyone was caught with a concealed weapon at Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the person would be denied access to the gate area but the local prosecutor would decline to prosecute. Obviously, if you were about to get on a plane you were a traveler and, thus, your concealed carry was legal under state law. And since the screeners caught you before you got into the secured area of the airport, you hadn't run afoul of any federal law. The only real consequence was that getting all this sorted out was guaranteed to make you miss your flight.
Yes. Absolutely. Try going into a few federal buildings these days with one of the latest and greatest phone/camera combos. Where I work, you'll be politely (and then, if necessary, firmly) told to return to your car and leave it there.
Yes, I think this is silly. But I also know that this is the type of crap we're going to have to deal with for a long while.
Truer words were never spoken. I remember when I first woke up to this fact. I was just a kid, watching Donohue's talk show. He was interviewing people who were imploring the public to be more cognizant of the possibility that their kids could go missing. Without specifics, they were giving the impression that there were pervy kidnappers around every corner, just waiting to snatch your kids, abuse them in unspeakable ways, and then sell them into sexual slavery.
Then one of the guests said that 50,000 kids go missing every year and something clicked in my brain. It may have been the fact that this guy dropped such a horrible statistic and the program then cut to a PSA for the organization he represented, a PSA begging for donations. But, more likely, I think it was that the Vietnam war had not been long over and we'd had 50,000 casualties in that war. Everyone knew someone with a family member hurt or killed in Vietnam. But I didn't know anyone whose kid had been snatched off a playground by some old man in a dirty raincoat.
I did some research. The horrifically inflated figures the guy was spouting included runaways, throwaways, kids living with non-custodial spouses, and a huge measure of just plain old exaggeration. The best data that I could find, from the Illinois State Police (the first law enforcement agency to really study the problem) was that true, non-family, non-ransom, oh-my-God-some-perv-just-grabbed-my-little-boy-off -the-playground abductions happened somewhere between 50 and 150 times a year in the U.S.
That's really bad. I'd be willing to give money to any organization that could help put a dent in that problem. But any organization that feels the need to pander for donations by scaring the crap out of everyone gets nada from me.
Of course, those of you old enough to remember will recall that in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, the fear-mongerers won. We went through a long period where the media would have had us believe that Satanic child molestors were everywhere. Thank goodness everyone eventually realized that was all a bunch of bunk. Now, we've settled down to just a simple, constant state of excess paranoia.
I watched the first "Survivor" with great interest. Thought it was fascinating. Great concept. Lots of fun. Waited with great anticipation for the finale.
And then that psycho Machievellian POS won.
I haven't watched any of the cut-throat reality shows since. I think they're downright evil.
That sounds good, but it's never been the case. Athletics, shop classes, etc., have been a part of the education scene for as long as anyone alive can remember. They serve purposes other than pure academic advancement but someone, somewhere a long time ago decided that those purposes were sufficiently valid that time should be taken off of pure academics to engage in those activities.
The question is: What non-academic stuff is so important that we can all (pretty much) agree on the positive utility of taking time out of the school day to focus on it? Where I came from, football is so important that it ran roughshod over everything else. I didn't agree, but I was definitely in the minority with that opinion.
For many people today, discussion of HIV/AIDS is so important that it should happen in school. It's not purely academic and it certainly is also about socialization and life skills, but most people are willing to accept that some HIV/AIDS education during the school day isn't a bad thing. So now we come to political agendas and my real point. Once you get beyond math, everything is tainted by a political agenda. You can't avoid it. Do you object, on the grounds that it is spoonfeeding some lobbiest's political agenda, to the teaching of HIV/AIDS-related information? Even if it's by a "gay activist?" What about gun safety? Is that important enough to spend some time on? Even if the only really effective and accurate program on the subject is the "Eddie Eagle" program from the National Rifle Association? Have you fully reviewed the genesis of the history books used in your local school? The amount of political jockeying that ultimately decides what does and doesn't go into school books is flat out insane.
My point is that everything is political. Condemning the RIAA from wanting to get into the schools on the grounds that they are political is pointless. The schools are already shot through with political agendas.
Far better, I think, to simply object on the grounds that this thing isn't important enough to waste your kid's limited time on.
I used to work maintenance for an apartment complex. The law in the State of Texas was, in brief, that if you hadn't paid your rent, you didn't have any rights. And, realistically, when you're three days delinquent in your rent the management simply must stick their head in your door to find out, at minimum, if you've skipped on your lease.
:-)
So I go out with the manager while she's looking for skips. Everyone got a note on their door two days previously and they're now three days late on the rent. She always knocks loudly and waits a reasonable period before opening any doors.
So she cracks open one door and a knife comes flying out the crack. It was a pretty good throw, hard and accurate to hit that little slit when the door opened, but it was just a bit high. She closed the door and called the police. They refused to do anything since she hadn't seen the thrower. But you better believe that she enforced the lease and we moved those idiots out 7 days later.
My point? When you live in an apartment, at least in Texas, there are a bunch of folks who have a legal right to enter your apartment at any time, often with no notice. Know your rights and know the law when you rent.
PS - Mercy, do I have some stories about the stuff I saw in apartments. Mind you, outside of an emergency, I only entered apartments in response to a call for service. I was invited in, in writing, usually to perform work while people were gone to work during the day.
So why on earth did they leave their pot stash right out on the coffee table? (I swear, it was half a kilo - the pile was 6 inches high and two feet across.) So why do people call for service when they know that as soon as I enter their apartment I'm going to figure out that they are the folks who stole all the furniture from around the pool last month? It's just amazing the way some people don't think before they act. And yes, I moved all the furniture out of their apartment and put it back by the pool and they never said a word.